Story at odds with Powell's UN case
By Cam Simpson and Stevenson Swanson (Chicago Tribune)
February 11, 2003

HAMBURG, Germany -- A former Al Qaeda recruit told German authorities last year that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi(*), portrayed by the Bush administration as the critical link between Osama bin Laden's group and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, was actually opposed to Al Qaeda.

In voluminous statements given to German federal police after his April arrest, Shadi Abdallah, a 26-year-old Jordanian who claims to have served briefly as a bin Laden bodyguard, maintained that Zarqawi was allied instead with Iraq's enemy, the fundamentalist Islamic government of Iran.Abdallah, arrested after he was overheard by police discussing weapons and munitions in a phone call with Zarqawi, later painted a picture of Zarqawi that appears to be in stark contrast to the image unveiled last week by Secretary of State Colin Powell.

It is possible that Zarqawi, who Powell said visited Baghdad for medical treatment last spring, has forged new bonds with bin Laden and Iraq since Abdallah's arrest. But in some of his 22 separate police interrogation sessions spanning seven months last year, copies of which were obtained by the Chicago Tribune, Abdallah declared that Zarqawi, a one-legged Jordanian who is now at large, had "links with all [terrorist] groups with the exception of Al Qaeda."

"He is against Al Qaeda," Abdallah said.

Abdallah, who said he grew closer to Zarqawi after first being recruited into his terrorist training camp in Afghanistan three years ago, also detailed the objectives of Zarqawi's network to his German interrogators, directly contrasting them with the aims of Al Qaeda.

Even if Zarqawi's links to bin Laden and Iraq are recent, Abdallah's statements lay out a deeper history that appears to bolster the arguments of skeptics outside the U.S. government who say the Bush administration's case linking Al Qaeda and Iraq is weak.

In his speech last week, Powell told the UN Security Council that Zarqawi provides the crucial link between Iraq and bin Laden's network. The administration is using the argument to press its case for military action against Hussein's regime.

The alleged link between Hussein and Zarqawi substantiates a "sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder," Powell said.

Zarqawi's network is known to intelligence officials in the Middle East, Europe and the U.S. as Al-Tawhid.

In 1999 Zarqawi was linked by Jordanian and U.S. officials to an alleged plot to attack Israeli and American tourists in Jordan during the worldwide year 2000 celebration. More recently, Zarqawi's operatives were blamed for the assassination last October of Laurence Foley, an American diplomat gunned down in Amman, Jordan.

Powell did not substantiate his claim that Zarqawi was a collaborator of bin Laden and his lieutenants. But he said Zarwaqi's network helped establish a poison and explosives training center in northeastern Iraq.

That camp, however, is run by Ansar al-Islam, a group violently opposed to Hussein and operating in a region outside of his control. Ansar al-Islam seeks the establishment of an Islamic regime in Baghdad similar to that in Iran.

Al-Tawhid, Zarqawi's network, is made up primarily of Jordanians and Palestinians, according to Abdallah, who was a self-professed Zarqawi operative in Germany until his arrest. Although a German intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, suggested that all of Abdallah's statements may not be believable, Abdallah was a key government witness for the Germans in the first prosecution of a Sept. 11 case. A Hamburg-based cell, which included three of the four suicide pilots, was instrumental in carrying out the attacks.

Abdallah told the Germans that his road to Zarqawi and Islamic extremism was long but not unfamiliar for others pulled into the Islamic extremist fold.

He said his youth in Germany was filled with sex, alcohol and drugs. He made a pilgrimage to Mecca in December 1999 to find his faith, he said. Once there, Abdallah said, he met a cleric who persuaded him to travel to Pakistan and contact an operative who could arrange for his journey into Afghanistan.

"They asked everyone about their general religious and political views," Abdallah said of his initial contacts with Al Qaeda at a safe house, adding that he even received a questionnaire.

"I told them my objective was to get a deeper understanding of my religion . . . but they said the idea was to train me in Afghanistan to be a fighter."

Abdallah said he spent about 20 days at a basic-training camp in Kandahar, where he received Al Qaeda indoctrination that included rhetoric extolling the simultaneous 1998 bombings of two U.S. Embassies in East Africa. Abdallah said that after he was hospitalized for a head injury that prematurely ended his training in Kandahar, he met some fellow Jordanians who told him there were better opportunities in Kabul.

Once there, he quickly met Zarqawi, who also was known by aliases including "Mahannad."

Zarqawi "was the head of a military training camp where only fighters from Jordan were trained," Abdallah told his interrogators. He drew them maps of the terrorist compounds.

Unknown connections

Abdallah told the Germans that he had known a top Zarqawi cell leader in Germany for many years, although he apparently did not know of the man's ties to Zarqawi until he was in Kabul. Zarqawi phoned the operative, who vouched for Abdallah, and the pair grew close, Abdallah said.

In Kabul, Abdallah said, he learned Zarqawi "has links with all the [terrorist] groups with the exception of Al Qaeda. All groups like him because he is always willing to help and supports everybody."

But Abdallah said Zarqawi "is against Al Qaeda."

Unlike Al Qaeda, Zarqawi's goal was to topple the secular Jordanian government "in order to establish an Islamic regime." His aims included "attacks against the military forces, the police and the secret services [in Jordan] without distinguishing whether the victim is an officer or a simple soldier."

Although he stuck mostly with Zarqawi and the Jordanians, Abdallah said he sometimes traveled to Kandahar, where there was a stronger Al Qaeda influence. While there in March or April of 2000, following widespread fear that someone was going to try to assassinate bin Laden, Abdallah claimed he briefly was pulled into an extra bodyguard detail for the Al Qaeda leader.

Like bin Laden, Abdallah is tall, which he suggested was one of the reasons he got the assignment.

During his contacts with Al Qaeda, he said, he came to better understand that Zarqawi led an "organization that has the same religious principals as Al Qaeda, but aims toward quite different goals."

Zarqawi's goals, as stated repeatedly by Abdallah, did not specifically include attacks against Americans. Ranking beneath attacks in Jordan, he explained, were "attacks against the Jews and Jewish interests. He wants to execute attacks against the Israelis in Palestine, and he is capable."

Iran protecting fugitive

He also said Zarqawi "stays in Iran and is being protected by the Iranian government," to which he turned after the allied invasion of Afghanistan. Abdallah also said Zarqawi relied heavily on the support of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord and former Afghan prime minister.

In the telephone conversations secretly recorded last spring by the Germans, Zarqawi, Abdallah and others spoke in code, which Abdallah translated after his arrest: "Lebanese apples" were hand grenades; a "silent" was a gun with a silencer, and "black pills" were explosives.

Although Zarqawi, Abdallah and other operatives were overheard last spring discussing attacks against Jewish or Israeli targets in Germany, Abdallah claimed he had intended to contact the police once a concrete plan was formed.

Sec Powell said Iraq was harbouring an Al-Qaeda terrorist infrastructure and named one alleged operative, Abu Musab Zarqawi, as a key figure. In May 2002, Zarqawi received medical treatment in Baghdad for injuries sustained during the coalition operation in Afghanistan.

He said Zarqawi, a Jordanian, had been allowed to instruct Al-Qaeda operatives in the production and use of Ricin and other toxins at the Khurmal camp. Zarqawi is thought to have sponsored the recent assassination of US diplomat Lawrence Foley in Jordan, and ties to Al-Qaeda attempts to mount chemical and biological terrorist attacks in European countries including Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Russia. An Al-Qaeda detainee named as Abu Atia - who graduated from an Afghan training camp run by Zarqawi, revealed to interrogators that Zarqawi had tasked at least nine north African extremists in 2001 to travel to Europe to conduct terrorist attacks using toxins and explosives.

"During his [Zarqawi's] stay in Iraq, nearly two dozen extremists converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there," Powell said. "These Al-Qaeda affiliates based in Baghdad now coordinate the movement of people, money, and supplies into and throughout Iraq for his [Zarqawi's] network, and they have now been operating freely in the capital for more than eight months."

Powell's view was that 'ambition and hatred' would be enough to lead Al-Qaeda and Iraq into a strategic alliance. "Some believe, some claim, that these contacts do not amount to much," he said. "They say Saddam Hussein's secular tyranny and Al-Qaeda's religious tyranny do not mix. I am not comforted by this thought."